Labour in Irish History

by James Connolly

'Tis civilisation, so ye say, and
cannot be changed for the weakness of men,
Take heed, take heed, 'tis a dangerous way to drive the wild wolf
to the end of his den.
Take heed of your civilisation, ye, 'tis a pyramid built upon
quivering hearts,
There are times, as Paris in '93, when the commonest men play
terrible parts.
Take heed of your progress, its feet are shod with the souls it
slew, with its own pollutions,
Submission is good, but the order of God may flame the torch of
the revolutions.
-- John Boyle O'Reilly.

For both Ireland and Great Britain the
period between the winning of Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the
year 1850 was marked by great misery and destitution amongst the
producing classes, accompanied by abortive attempts at revolution in
both countries, and the concession of some few unimportant political
and social reforms. In Ireland the first move against the forces of
privilege was the abolition of the Tithes, or, more correctly
speaking, the abolition of the harsh and brutal features attendant
upon the collection of the tithes. The clergy of the Episcopalian
Church, the Church by law established in Ireland, were legally
entitled to levy upon the people of each district, irrespective of
religion, a certain tax for the upkeep of that Church and its
ministers. The fact that this was in conformity with the practice of
the Catholic Church in countries where it was dominant did not, of
course, make this any more palatable to the Catholic peasantry of
Ireland, who continually saw a part of their crops seized upon and
sold to maintain a clergy whose ministrations they never attended,
and whose religion they detested. Eventually their discontent at the
injustice grew so acute as to flare forth in open rebellion, and
accordingly all over Ireland the tenants began to resist the
collection of tithes by every means in their power.

The Episcopalian clergymen called on the
aid of the law, and, escorted by police and military, seized the
produce of the poor tenants and carried it off to be sold at
auction; the peasantry, on the other hand, collected at dead of
night and carried off the crops and cattle from farms upon which the
distraint was to be made, and, when that was impossible, they strove
by acts of violence to terrorise auctioneers and buyers from
consummating the sale. Many a bright young life was extinguished on
the gallows, or rotted away in prison cells, as a result of this
attempt to sustain a hated religion by contributions exacted at the
point of the bayonet, until eventually the struggle assumed all the
aspect of a civil war. At several places when the military were
returning from raiding the farm of some poor peasant, the country
people gathered, erected barricades, and opposed their passage by
force. Significantly enough of the temper and qualities of the
people in those engagements, they generally succeeded in rescuing
their crops and cattle from the police and military, and in
demonstrating that Ireland still possessed all the material
requisite for armed rebellion.

In one conflict at Newtownbarry, twelve
peasants were shot and twenty fatally wounded; in another at
Carrigshock eleven policemen were killed and seventeen wounded; and
at a great fight at Rathcormack, twelve peasants were killed in a
fight with a large body of military and armed police. Eye-witnesses
declared that the poor farmers and labourers engaged, stood the
charge and volleys of the soldiers as firmly as if they had been
seasoned troops, a fact that impressed the Government more than a
million speeches could have done. The gravity of the crisis was
enhanced by the contrast between the small sum often involved, and
the bloodshed necessary to recover it. Thus, at Rathcormack, twelve
peasants were massacred in an attempt to save the effects of a poor
widow from being sold to pay a sum of forty shillings due as tithes.
The ultimate effect of all this resistance was the passage of a Tithes
Commutation Act by which the collection of tithes was
abolished, and the substitution in its place of a `Tithe Rent
Charge' by means of which the sums necessary for the support of the
Episcopalian clergy were included in the rent and paid as part of
that tribute to the landed aristocracy. In other words, the economic
drain remained, but it was deprived of all the more odious and
galling features of its collection. The secret Ribbon and Whiteboy
Societies were the most effective weapons of the peasantry in this
fight, and to their activities the victory is largely to be
attributed. The politicians gave neither help nor countenance to the
fight, and save for the advocacy of one small Dublin newspaper,
conducted by a small but brilliant band of young Protestant writers,
no journal in all Ireland championed their cause. For the Catholic
clergy it is enough to say that while this tithe war was being
waged, they were almost universally silent about that `grievous sin
of secret conspiracy' upon which they are usually so eloquent. We
would not dare to say that they recognised that, as the secret
societies were doing their work against a rival priesthood, it was
better to be sparing in their denunciations for the time being;
perhaps that is not the explanation, but at all events it is
noteworthy that as soon as the tithe war was won, all the old stock
invectives against every kind of extra-constitutional action were
immediately renewed.

Contemporaneously with this tithe-war had
grown up the agitation for repeal of the Legislative Union led by
Daniel O'Connell, and supported by the large body of the middle
classes, and by practically all the Catholic clergy. At the outset
of this agitation the Irish working class, partly because they
accepted O'Connell's explanation of the decay of Irish trade as due
to the Union; and partly because they did not believe he was sincere
in his professions of loyalty to the English monarchy, nor in his
desire to limit his aims to repeal, enthusiastically endorsed and
assisted his agitation. He, on his part, incorporated the trades
bodies in his association with rights equal to that of regularly
enrolled members, a proceeding which evoked considerable dissent
from many quarters. Thus the Irish Monthly Magazine
(Dublin), a rabidly O'Connellite journal, in its issue of September,
1832, complains that the National Union (of Repealers) is in danger
because `there is a contemporary union composed of the tradesmen and
operative classes, the members of which are qualified to vote at its
sittings, and who are in every respect put upon a perfect equality
with the members of the National Union'. And in its December number
of the same year it returns to the charge with the significant
statement that `In fact we apprehend great mischief and little good
from the trades union as at present constituted'. The representative
of the English King in Ireland, Lord Lieutenant Anglesey, apparently
coincided in the opinion of this follower of O'Connell as to the
danger of Irish trade unions in politics, for when the Dublin trade
bodies projected a mammoth demonstration in favour of Repeal, he
immediately proclaimed it, and ordered the military to suppress it,
if necessary, by armed force. But as O'Connell grew in strength in
the country, and attracted to himself more and more of the
capitalist and professional classes in Ireland, and as he became
more necessary to the schemes of the Whig politicians in England,
and thought these latter more necessary to his success, he ceased to
play for the favour of organised labour, and gradually developed
into the most bitter and unscrupulous enemy of trade unionism
Ireland has yet produced, signalising the trades of Dublin always
out for his most venomous attack.

In 1835 O'Connell took his seat on the
Ministerial side of the House of Commons as a supporter of the Whig
Government. At that time the labouring population of England were
the most exploited, degraded, and almost dehumanised of all the
peoples of Europe. The tale of their condition reveals such
inhumanity on the part of the masters, such woeful degradation on
the side of the toilers, that were it not attested by the sober
record of witnesses before various Parliamentary Commissions the
record would be entirely unbelievable. Women worked down in coal
mines, almost naked, for a pitiful wage, often giving birth to
children when surprised by the pains of parturition amidst the
darkness and gloom of their places of employment; little boys and
girls were employed drawing heavy hutches (wagons) of coal along the
pit-floors by means of a strap around their bodies and passing
through between their little legs; in cotton factories little tots
of eight, seven, and even six years of age of both sexes were kept
attending machinery, being hired like slaves from workhouses for
that purpose, and worked twelve, fourteen, and even sixteen hours
per day, living, sleeping, and working under conditions which caused
them to die off as with a plague; in pottery works, bakeshops,
clothing factories and workrooms the overwork and unhealthy
conditions of employment led to such suffering and degradation and
shortening of life that the very existence of the working-class was
endangered. In the agricultural districts the sufferings of the poor
were so terrible that the English agricultural labourer -- the most
stolidly patient, unimaginative person on the face of the earth --
broke out into riots, machine- breaking, and hay-rick burning. As in
Ireland, Captain Rock or Captain Moonlight had been supposed to be
the presiding genius of the nocturnal revolts of the peasantry, so
in England, Captain Swing, an equally mythical personage, took the
blame or the credit. In a booklet circulated amongst the English
agricultural labourers, Captain Swing is made to say: `I am not the
author of these burnings. These fires are caused by farmers having
been turned out of their lands to make room for foxes, peasants
confined two years in prison for picking up a dead partridge, and
parsons taking a poor man's only cow for the tithe of his cabbage
garden'. So great was the distress, so brutal the laws, and so
hopelessly desperate the labourers, that in the Special Assize held
at Winchester in December, 1830, no less than three hundred
prisoners were put upon trial, a great number of whom were sentenced
to death. Of the number so condemned, six were actually hanged,
twenty transported for life, and the rest for smaller periods. We
are told in the English Via Dolorosa, of
William Heath, that `a child of fourteen had sentence of death
recorded against him; and two brothers, one twenty, the other
nineteen, were ruthlessly hanged on Penenden Heath, whither they
were escorted by a regiment of Scots Greys'. As to whom was
responsible for all this suffering, contemporary witnesses leave no
doubt: The London Times, most conservative of all
capitalist papers, in its issue of December 27, 1830, declared: --
`We do affirm that the actions of this pitiable class of men (the
labourers) are a commentary on the treatment experienced by them at
the hands of the upper and middling classes. The present population
must be provided for in body and spirit on more liberal and
Christian principles, or the whole mass of labourers will start into
legions of banditti -- banditti less criminal than
those who have made them so; those who by a just but fearful
retribution will soon become their victims'. And in 1833 a
Parliamentary Commission reported that `The condition of the
agricultural labourers was brutal and wretched; their children
during the day were struggling with the pigs for food, and at night
were huddled down on damp straw under a roof of rotten thatch'.

In the large towns the same state of
rebellion prevailed, the military were continually on duty, and so
many people were killed that the coroners ceased to hold inquests.
Such was the state of England -- misery and revolt beneath, and
sanguinary repression coupled with merciless greed above -- at the
time when O'Connell, taking his seat in Parliament, threw all his
force on the side of capitalist privilege and against social reform.

In 1838 five cotton-spinners in Glasgow, in
Scotland, were sentenced to seven years' transportation for acts
they had committed in connection with trade union combination to
better the miserable condition of their class. As the punishment was
universally felt to be excessive, even in the brutal spirit of the
times, Mr. Walkley, Member of Parliament for Finsbury, on the 13th
of February of that year, brought forward a motion in the House of
Commons for a `Select Committee to enquire into the constitution,
practices, and effects of the Association of Cotton Operatives of
Glasgow.' O'Connell opposed the motion, and used the opportunity to
attack the Irish trade-unions. He said: --

`There was no tyranny equal to that which
was exercised by the trade-unionists in Dublin over their fellow
labourers. One rule of the workmen prescribed a minimum rate of
wages so that the best workman received no more than the worst.
Another part of their system was directed towards depriving the
masters of all freedom in their power of selecting workmen, the
names of the workmen being inscribed in a book, and the employer
compelled to take the first on the list'.

He said that at Bandon a large factory had
been closed, through the efforts of the men to get higher wages,
ditto at Belfast, and `it was calculated that wages to the amount of
£500,000 per year were lost to Dublin by trade-unions. The
combination of tailors in that city, for instance, had raised the
price of clothes to such a pitch that it was worth a person's while
to go to Glasgow and wait a couple of days for a suit, the
difference in the price paying the expense of the trip' He also
ascribed the disappearance of the shipbuilding trades from Dublin to
the evil effects of trade unions.

Because of O'Connell's speech his friends,
the Whig Government, appointed a committee, not to enquire into the
Glasgow cases, but to investigate the acts of the Irish, and
especially of the Dublin, trade unions. The Special Committee sat
and collected two volumes of evidence, O'Connell producing a number
of witnesses to bear testimony against the Irish trade unionists,
but the report of the committee was never presented to the House of
Commons. In June of the same year, 1838, O'Connell had another
opportunity to vent his animus against the working class, and serve
the interest of English and Irish capitalism, and was not slow to
take advantage of it. In the year 1833, mainly owing to the efforts
of the organised factory operatives, and some high-spirited
philanthropists, a law had been enacted forbidding the employment of
children under nine years of age in factories except
silk-mills, and forbidding those under thirteen from working more
than forty-eight hours per week, or nine hours per day. The ages
mentioned will convey to the reader some idea of how infantile flesh
and blood had been sacrificed to sate the greed of the propertied
class. Yet this eminently moderate enactment was fiercely hated by
the godly capitalists of England, and by every unscrupulous device
they could contrive they strove to circumvent it. So constant and
effective was their evasion of its merciful provisions that on the
23rd of June the famous friend of the factory operatives, Lord
Ashley, in the House of Commons, moved as an amendment to the Order
of the Day the second reading of a Bill to more effectually
regulate Factory Works, its purpose being to prevent or
punish any further infringement of the Act of 1833. O'Connell
opposed the motion, and attempted to justify the infringement of the
law by the employers by stating that `they (Parliament) had
legislated against the nature of things, and against the right of
industry'. `Let them not', he said, `be guilty of the childish folly
of regulating the labour of adults, and go about parading before the
world their ridiculous humanity, which would end by
converting their manufacturers into beggars'. The phrase about
regulating the labour of adults was borrowed from the defence set up
by the capitalists that preventing the employment of children also
interfered with the labour of adults -- freeborn Englishmen!
O'Connell was not above using this clap-trap, as he on a previous
occasion had not been above making the lying pretence that the
enforcement of a minimum wage prevented the payment of high
wages to any specially skilled artisan.

On this question of the attitude to be
taken up towards the claims of labour, O'Connell differed radically
with one of his most capable lieutenants, Fergus O'Connor. The
latter, being returned to Parliament as a Repealer, was struck by
the miserable condition of the real people of England in whose
interests Ireland was supposed to be governed, and as the result of
his investigation into its cause, he arrived at the conclusion that
the basis of the oppression of Ireland was economic, that labour in
England was oppressed by the same class and by the operation of the
same causes as had impoverished and ruined Ireland, and that the
solution of the problem in both countries required the union of the
democracies in one common battle against their oppressors. He
earnestly strove to impress this view upon O'Connell, only to find,
that in the latter class-feeling was much stronger than desire for
Irish National freedom, and that he, O'Connell, felt himself to be
much more akin to the propertied class of England than to the
working class of Ireland. This was proven by his actions in the
cases above cited. This divergence of opinion between O'Connell and
O'Connor closed Ireland to the latter and gave him to the Chartists
as one of their most fearless and trusted leaders.

When he died, more than 50,000 toilers
marched in the funeral procession which bore his remains to his last
resting- place. He was one of the first of that long list of Irish
fighters in Great Britain whose unselfish sacrifices have gone to
make a record for an `English' Labour movement. That the propertied
and oppressing classes were well aware of the value of O'Connell's
services against the democracy, and were believed to be grateful for
the same was attested by the action of Richard Lalor Shiel when,
defending him during the famous State trials, he claimed the
consideration of the Court for O'Connell, because he had stood
between the people of Ireland and the people of England, and so
`prevented a junction which would be formidable enough to overturn
any administration that could be formed'. But, as zealous as
O'Connell and the middle class repealers were to prevent any
international action of the democracies, the Irish Working Class
were as enthusiastic in their desire to consummate it. Irish
Chartist Associations sprang up all over the island, and we are
informed by a writer in the United Irishman of John
Mitchel, 1848, that in Dublin they had grown so strong and so
hostile to O'Connellism that at one time negotiations were in
progress for a public debate between the Liberator and a
representative of the Dublin trades. But upon the arrest and
imprisonment of O'Connell, he continues, the Working Class were
persuaded to abandon their separate organisations for the sake of
presenting a common front to the Government, a step they afterwards
regretted. To this letter John Mitchel, as editor, appended a note
reminding his readers of the anti- labour record of O'Connell, and
adducing it as a further reason for repudiating his leadership. Yet
it is curious that in his History of Ireland Mitchel
omits all reference to this disgraceful side of O'Connell's career,
as do indeed all the other Irish `Historians.' If silence gives
consent, then all our history (?) writing scribes have consented to,
and hence approved of, this suppression of the facts of history in
order to assist in perpetuating the blindness and the subjection of
labour.